


Now go quickly to your shelters

by sixthletter



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: But Also Mirrorverse in Parts, Christmas fic, Dialogue Heavy, Fluff, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-09
Updated: 2016-11-09
Packaged: 2018-08-30 00:53:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8512474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixthletter/pseuds/sixthletter
Summary: The first year out, Jim grins and says: "Bones! You've always been a fan of exciting and educational cultural dialogue!"
McCoy glares at him appraisingly. "Get back to decontamination."





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm attempting to move all my old fic over to AO3, so enjoy this five-and-no-plus-one from roughly the dawn of time.

**2259**

The first year out, Jim grins and says: "Bones! You've always been a fan of exciting and educational cultural dialogue!"

McCoy glares at him appraisingly. "Get back to decontamination."

The grin wavers. "The Denosians have researched Christmas?"

The glare does not.

"No, really, Bones, it's fine. They're gonna replicate a pine tree, roast a ham -"

"A ham?"

"A ham-shaped piece of one of those green deer animals, whatever. They have a recipe for pie, and they want to throw an earth Christmas for us, and in exchange we sit through their winter solstice driving-green-deer-animals-between-fires thing and look attentive."

"Take Uhura."

"Ethnographic study, she's staying with a family."

"Take Spock."

"Not that convincing as a Terran."

"Chekov?"

"Jewish."

"Rand?"

"Has plans."

"Sulu?"

"With Rand."

"Take _anybody else_ , Jim."

"Bones, Bones, Bones," Jim shakes his head slowly, working his way up to his most patronising smile. "I know you're normally only allowed out during disasters, and I'm sorry for that, really I am, but there are three important facts about educational cultural exchange that you don't seem to be considering."

"And they'd be?"

"Okay, first - and weirdly often - free pie. Or at least real food. Or at least free food. Whatever. Secondly, honest-to-god water showers. Thirdly, beds not issued by the 'fleet. _Huge_ ones. With sheets. And _pie_."

"Huh," McCoy says. "I never thought about it like that."

Which is how the two of them end up feasting on green deer and cranberry with the High Council of Lower Denos, drinking honest-to-goodness cider and wearing honest-to-goodness paper hats. It's maybe a little embarrassing and Jim keeps kicking him in the shin under the table and hissing at him to smile, but it's fine, for the most part. McCoy thinks he could maybe get used to this tactful diplomacy thing, given time.

It's at this point, when McCoy's a glass or two ahead of where he claims to be and feeling cautiously optimistic, that one of the High Councilmen leans in close to him and says, "I must admit I was surprised that you and the captain chose to attend. We never dreamed that the Federation would offer us such impressive sacrifices."

McCoy's roar of outrage turns into a laugh somewhere between his brain and his mouth, a reflex which he finds baffling but which perhaps explains why Jim always looks so cheerful. "Well, we aim to please," he says, fervently thanking any and all gods that the universal translator doesn't handle tone well. "What exactly is it we have to do?"

"Oh, it's really very simple. You'll each be taken and tied to a lanois, and then we'll build a ceremonial fire around each of you and, once you're dead, drive the chengise between them."

_Strange thing to call a deer,_ McCoy's brain supplies, somewhat unhelpfully. He smiles so wide a muscle in his jaw begins to twitch. "Well, we’re just delighted," he says. "Jim, could I talk to you for just a minute? Thank you so much."

 

 

**2260**

McCoy spends most of their second Christmas in space thinking, _I have to call Joanna in a half hour_ while the man who looks like Jim grins like Jim is wont to and orders them to up the power.

McCoy says, "You look fucking ridiculous." A man who looks like him leans in close to the booth, makes a note on a PADD and then cranks the dial all the way to eleven.

 

 

**2261**

By Christmas of their third year, the Enterprise has taken such a beating it's been recalled to what the 'fleet nostalgically refer to as the dry dock, and McCoy actually gets to spend the whole of December on solid ground. He's in Georgia with Joanna for a week, and it's a good thing she doesn't believe in Santa anymore because McCoy has practically bankrupted himself buying her shiny things from distant galaxies in the hope that he can make himself memorable somehow, and there's no goddamn way he's letting someone else take credit for them.

Joanna squeals with delight and throws her arms around his neck like she's been missing this as much as he has. She's giddily enthusiastic about everything he has to offer and the safe, warm weight of her in his arms shakes loose something in McCoy's chest that he hadn't realised was knotted.

The warmth stays with him all the way up to Riverside, where he meets up with the Kirks and sits through a dinner so tense that Jim actually excuses himself then climbs out of a window to escape it. McCoy finds the kid three hours later: he's sadly, sloppily drunk, propped up against the back wall of a hangar in the shipyard, toeing at the snow in a way that McCoy knows from bitter experience means _I will get up once I figure out how_.

"Want a hand there, kid?"

Jim laughs, but it's the kind that probably started as something else. "I got it," he says, levering himself halfway up. "I got it, I'm just gonna - " he pushes away from the wall, grinning triumphantly, and McCoy steps in to catch him as he falls forwards.

"Easy, easy. Jesus, Jim, how much did you drink?"

"A whole," Jim informs him, pulling out of McCoy's grasp and attempting to stand. "A whole, god, I don't even - . It was red."

"Red?"

" _Red_ ," Jim says. He sits back down, heavily and not entirely on purpose. "Shit, shit, Bones, I'm so fucking sorry, I'm so - " the next word comes out as more of a sound, Jim's voice thick with something unidentifiable, his face buried in the crook of his arm.

"It's okay," McCoy says. "It's all gonna be okay, don't worry. I'll take care of it. You're going to be fine." They're nothing phrases when they first comes out, something reassuring said in the voice he reserves for patients he might be lying to, but then Jim's shoulders hitch again and McCoy finds himself tightening his grip on Jim's collar and meaning everything, the kick to his chest sudden and fierce.

 

 

**2262**  
The fourth year out is an utter fucking farce, as far as McCoy’s concerned. He and Jim manage to escape from one part of a prison planet just as the rest of the away team break into another wing entirely, and they spend the best part of twelve hours wading through sewers, trying to avoid teams of heavily-armed, many-tentacled guards and find some way to respond to an increasingly weak signal from a rescue party who appear to be going the wrong way.

When they reach the end of the sewer it is, obviously, several hundred feet about sea level and, just because the universe hates them, covered with an iron grate which doesn’t even have the good grace to be rusted through.

“We’re cursed,” McCoy says.

“ _You’re_ cursed,” Jim tells him, heaving at the grate. “They usually give way when I’m on my own.”

“You’re saying I haven’t had to put you together after every major holiday we’ve ever spent together?”

“You put me together every week. Is there anything we can use to lever this up?”

“We’re in a sewer, Jim. And you can’t tell me it doesn’t get worse every time there’s a public holiday. It’s like living in a goddamn soap opera.”

Jim grunts, shifting his grip. “I’ll give you the canopy fire, but that was during Diwali. Neither of us celebrate Diwali, you can’t just – ”

“The Thanksgiving Klingons.”

“That was a freakish coincidence.”

“The away team we lost over Easter.”

“Who celebrates Easter anymore?”

“Sixteen people fewer than before, Jim, that’s who. And don’t even get me started on Federation Day.”

“Fed Day parades are terrorist magnets, everyone knows that.”

“The point I’m trying to make is – move over, try nearer the hinges – that it’s a public holiday _again_ and we’re escaping from a prison planet _again_ \- ”

“Wait, you’ve done this before?”

“That not what I meant and you know it.”

“Bones, you’re gonna be fine.”

“We’re gonna get executed.”

Jim has the audacity to roll his eyes at this simple statement of fact. “Trust me,” he says, “we’ll make it.”

McCoy listens to the ever-closer schlooping noise of armoured tentacles through shit.

“I think they’re mostly pissed at me,” Jim offers. “Just tell them I kidnapped you or something.” He smiles like it’s a joke but his face is utterly, completely sincere.

McCoy rolls his eyes. “When we get out of here, I’m punching you in the head.”

“Duly noted. First, leverage.”

 

 

**2263**

On Christmas morning of the final year of their first five-year mission, Leonard Horatio McCoy wrestles his commanding officer in a corridor.

A crowd gathers, mostly because the commanding officer in question won't stop shouting, "What the _shit_ , Bones?" at the top of his voice, even when McCoy is practically sitting on his chest and telling him to say uncle. "I was just going down to -"

" _No_."

"Is it pollen?" asks one of the crowd.

McCoy growls, which seems to count as a yes coming from him because a couple of lackeys from security manhandle Jim back into his quarters and then clear out quickly, sealing the door as they go.

 

"You better have a good fucking excuse for this," Jim hisses, fists clenched and held behind him, as if it's taking real effort not to punch McCoy in the face. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"You can't go." It sounds more desperate than McCoy intends.

"I'm the fucking captain."

"You can go tomorrow. Please." McCoy's pretty sure he rehearsed this speech, but fuck him if he can remember anything beyond _no_. "We do this every fucking year -"

"We fucking don't."

"No, Jim, look, every damn year there's some inocuous-sounding plan and every damn year we end up on fire or miserable or trapped on some fucking ice planet trying to figure out which dead yeoman to eat. And I know you come back with your guts in your hands week in week out and it's a little late to be actin' surprised now, but please, please, in the name of all that's holy, _stay still_."

Jim's face softens but he's still got his fists screwed tight, so when he looks like he's going to move McCoy does the first thing he can think of: he pushes Jim up against the wall and kisses him.

In all honesty, 'think' might have been too strong a term.

Still, Jim stops trying to punch him, and settles for fisting his hands in McCoy's shirt instead.

It’s hard and sharp and still mostly a fight, and McCoy is breathless in seconds. “New Year,” he thinks he says at some point, words damp against the skin somewhere along Jim’s jaw. He can’t quite remember where he is. “You can get yourself killed after New Year. For now, just.”

“I’m here,” Jim says, and some part of McCoy is inexplicably relieved. “I’m here, I’m okay.”

Something in McCoy’s chest unravels entirely. It’s something bright, something warm.


End file.
